HEREAFTER

Once the usher says “Enjoy your movie” it really is yours, in a way, or at least now it can never be disavowed. Not listening is a kind of listening. But why keep pretending we live in that bygone world that cared how everything would turn out? The only ones who care, as this deeply moving film makes clear, are the whispery backlit dead. The ghosts on the screen. And I tell you who’s up there. So that makes me the medium, i.e. Matt Damon, talented but always trying a bit too hard.

The movie’s riddle: how does a be-khakied, be-cable-knit-sweatered American get to be a British kid’s only hope, and score a hot French lady in the end? Look to the two world-historical events the plot includes: the tsunami and the London subway bombings. And our American knows death, and so gets to be a world citizen. In other words he is the boy from Remember Me, or his spiritual brother, given sufficient depth by our disastrous decade to understand what everyone else has long since learned to expect. Where do the three meet? At an amazing book fair! See, just publish your book with some random press, and good things will undoubtedly happen.

The living plead with our hero for a hint from their beloved lost. And the dead, ever destructive, clamor with the sins for which they wish to be forgiven. When she’s swept up in the tidal wave—the oceanic feeling, exactement ça—the French lady briefly goes where “you can be all things and all at once.” Coughing-up-water take. Beneath the metaphorical porticoes of this metaphorical pavilion one reels and retches, by a sea of images overwhelmed. Up on screen are all possibilities, if we can but die in our seats and sail among them. As for living, our celebrities can do that for us.